I’m playing around a bit with vCloud Air and Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, and in order to set up the vCloud Hybrid Service plugin in the vSphere Web Client you need to import the vCloud Air SSL certificate into vCenter. If the certificate isn’t present in the vCSA keystore when you try to authenticate with vCloud Air, you get a “Server Certificate not Verified” error, and you will be unsuccessful in configuring the plugin.

The Using the vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in document outlines how this can be accomplished, but it’s based on downloading the SSL certificate via a browser and then importing it into the vCenter Keystore. Since I mostly run the vCenter Server Appliance, I didn’t want to bother with downloading it from one of my desktops, and copying the files over to the vCSA for import.

I mean, there has to be a better way to do that, via the command line, right? Indeed there is, this little one-liner downloads and formats the certificate from vchs.vmware.com to /tmp on the vCSA, and then proceeds to import it into the keystore.